


if i could give you the moon

by newrromantics



Category: Gossip Girl (TV 2007)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-02
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:48:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27835552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newrromantics/pseuds/newrromantics
Summary: you are sixteen and you are on fire, fire, fire.a study in blair waldorf.
Relationships: Dan Humphrey/Blair Waldorf, Serena van der Woodsen/Blair Waldorf
Comments: 5
Kudos: 33





	if i could give you the moon

**Author's Note:**

> AHHH PUT MY NOTES IN MY SUMMARY BY MISTAKE . LITERALLY INSANE WORK BRAIN
> 
> trigger warning for ED stuff . i try 2 keep it light, because i'm in recovery and reading anything more than a sentence too long drives me insane but it is second nature 4 me to write im afraid
> 
> tw for domestic violence too
> 
> unedited etc . Literally just wanted 2 write something again so Publishing now as i rush for work<3

**if i could give you the moon**

you are sixteen and you are on fire, fire, _fire_. it hurts to touch you. it hurts to look too closely at you. your mother stopped braiding your hair for you at night last spring, the last intimate ritual the two of you shared. you think you should be sad, but your bones ache with a type of emptiness and longing for affection you've grown accustomed to not receiving. your best friend hasn't called you in five months, and last night, when you tried to unbutton his pants, he pushed your fingers away from his belt and curled up onto his side. down on your knees, you felt the heat of anger spread across your body before you closed your lips shut and readjusted the pearls hanging tight against your throat.

your nails are painted a pale pink, and when you push them inside your mouth, you think of the baby bird with all it's plucked feathers that serena cradled against her chest, squeezing it so tight you saw it's whole body burst into blood and guts inside a hazy, little dream window of your brain. he says he loves you, but each time you try to touch him he turns away. it's never been like that before.

and you are sixteen, sitting inside a hospital room with bare walls as a doctor prods your body with instruments. she is old, greying hair at the temples and ice-blue eyes that remind you of the coldness lily emanates after each new marriage. her fingers fasten a padded tool around your upper arm, asks for you to open your throat. the words she says swirl into the abyss. it is time to step backwards on a pair of scales. your parents are not waiting for you in the room outside, and he likes to pretend there's nothing wrong when you disappear after each date. if serena was here, but you catch the thought before it tears you apart. the moment she lets you out of her sterile office, you buy a muesli bar that you eat in the hospital bathroom. you tell yourself you know how to stop.

there is a story you write, about a princess who marries a prince. you tear it up before you go to sleep. dreaming is silly. he turns up in your penthouse at quarter past eleven, smelling heavy of weed and crawls into bed with you. his fingers push at your skin, whispers an apology at the crevice of your ear. you want to let him touch you, it's been so long, but he hasn't been good. he knows not to show up late at night, intoxicated or high. he knows better. so you roll your eyes and tell him a curt _no_ as he wraps his arms around your waist, his head fitting into the crook of your neck. he is perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect for you, and just when you are about to relent because your whole body is itching with unrest, he lets out a soft snore. you feel the bitter rise of resentment, push it down.

you ask dorota one afternoon, sitting at the kitchen counter, a sharp blade in hand. _why don't they love me_. the unspoken serena, nate. the very loud Mom, Dad. you cut carrots into julienne slices, the way she taught you. dorota tells you they love you, oh they all love you, how could they not? and you smile because she is kind, even when she is wrong. you tell her you like her more than maria. you don't say what you think: you are my best friend. you are the only person who i can talk to. i like you more than anyone. i love you i love you i love you

you tell him you love him between light hearted kisses and he catches your heart with his hands, tossing it back and forth like a football. he passes around the green sweater you gifted him like a joint, and he never knows what friend its with that week.

you are sixteen and you feel like you are sixty. she turns up at your party, all begging pleading eyes before leaving. all that lingers is a last hazy memory, the two of you in the hot tub, your skin burning as she leaned in close, close, closer, closer, closest.

::

**you asked me to walk you home  
** _(but i had to carry you in)_

there is one girl who shines brighter than the rest in your pre-kindergarten class orientation. her name is Serena, and her hair is so shiny, like the silk fabrics that crowd your house. her hands are warm when she hugs you, squeezing you so, so, tight, the way nobody has ever touched you before. she never stops talking. a mile a minute, so many words that remain gibberish, but all said with a glowing confidence at even four years old you try to emulate. to love her is to know her and to know her is to want to be her.

there is a spoiler alert that needs to be given for the story of your life: she breaks your heart, not once, and not twice, but so many times you lose count over the years. she gets under, under, under your skin harder than anyone else. she knows the ways to slide inside of your body, through her absence and through her fingers, curling your body over the bathroom counter, lifting your skirt up, up, _up._ Her fingers around your hips, her nails biting into soft skin. downstairs a party is blaring through the room, your boyfriend is smoking by the fireplace, and your friends are dancing to britney, and serena's got her lips on your neck and her fingers in your wet cunt. you moan through gritted teeth and shove her aside as soon as you're done. 

you think you hate her half the time. 

for your sixth birthday she gives you a stuffed bear she names cinnamon and stays with your family for two weeks in an extended sleepover. at night, the two of you crawl around the sprawling mansion of your home, overhearing your parents in the kitchen. t _hose poor kids,_ your father's voice - warm and comforting like honey and tea at bedtime, and your mother's, _they're so young; poor Serena, her mother is going to ruin her. such a gorgeous girl, too. s_ erena sobs in your arms that night, explaining how her mom got married and went on a honeymoon to the europeans and she wasn't invited, nuh-nuh, never ever ever!

you are in bed and she calls you crying, somewhere on the lower east side, and you get a taxi over to a nightclub and fight your way through the front door by threatening a lawsuit for underage drinking in the silk pyjamas your father brought you back from another trip to paris. she's in the corner, slumped against a wall, a gold dress with sequins falling off and the devil hanging off her shoulder in matching silver. georgina tries to say hello as you slip your arms around your fallen glittering best friend, but you turn a cold shower and fight your way through a swarm of sleazy men. nobody helps you. nobody ever helps. it has always been this way: the two of you against the world. you just wish she didn't choose to fight it so fucking often.

you leave her over two hundred voice messages the nine months she is gone for. i hope you're pregnant, bitch, you slur one night. nate's mouth is on you, lower, and you moan through the receiver, calling at his name as you cum, your fingers tangled in his hair, and you tell her _ihateyouihateyouihateyou_ in the same breathe. 

during her wedding, you are wet. you shift uncomfortably in your seat, your husband that never should have been raising an eyebrow. you cry, and you tell him you're so happy for her, for them, and you wish her husband was your husband and you wish her mouth was warm against yours. you are so wet you're afraid you're leaking through the seat, aching as you stare at the two of them. they don't look happy. they're not going to be happy. and later, when you're a warm drunk, she slides up against you, hugging you tight from behind in a best friend serena squeeze, and everybody is too deliriously drunk to notice the way her fingers curl around your waist and the way her lips linger on your ear. _you're kind of a slut, b, just sometimes_. she meets you later, in the bathroom, with a bottle of champagne she swiped from your secret stash and she pops it in the bath. nobody questions the disappearance, life-long best friends sharing one last hurrah moment, and she takes a long swig, and she touches you the way you've wanted her to touch you all evening. if she tastes her newly appointed husband's cum inside of you when she goes down on you, she doesn't mention it. that's what best friends are for.

::

**and you pushed me in**

the first time he fucks you, you bleed all over his backseat. there is so much blood you think you've torn something important. it stains your thigh, his chest, the rim of his mouth. he holds your hair back as he fucks your mouth, and you're ashamed to say you like it so much. so very much. it leads to no release, but you cry his best friends name and then you cry the rest of the ride home for the boy who broke your heart on the sidewalk.

chuck is not a boy you love, he is a man you're addicted to. he gives you something no one else can: an attention that can be taken and given. everyone else laps around you, half-interested, half-not. you coast by on the sidelines of their lives, wondering where you slot into the puzzle piece of their mind, with never enough push and shove to fight for your place, fight for an answer. but with chuck, he gives you none, and makes you work for one. you're obsessed, and the therapist you get after the divorce tells you you weren't shown love as a child. you don't turn up for the second appointment, get high on your fire escape instead. you're too old to be acting so reckless, but you lost so much of your youth to fighting.

he holds you down, and maybe you loved him once. you think you must have. how else could you explain all those years of back and forth. but it's hard to look back fondly on the memories you keep, after. he tore you apart, once, and you find yourself at thirty still stitching the seams of where he ripped you open. you think he must have his own sewing kit, where he tries to mend the patches of flesh you tore. you only fuck him once more, after the papers are signed: at a charity event for your sons school, in an empty room, and when you finish it doesn't feel like love, but it feels like something finite and infinite all at once. the two of you are tied together through a string you attached yourselves, and you laugh in that empty room with him, and feel the bruise of his love blossoming against your calf.

he had hit you, just the one time. right after henry was born and a business deal soured and he promised, promised, promised to never touch you again. that house laid barren for months until you charged into his office and took him on the desk. he was a changed man, but you weren't yet learning to heal.

and you know you loved him. you remember him as wonderful, sometimes, but that love was born from an obsession and a lacking in your own life. over a cocktail, shortly before the divorce, you share that secret with him. it hurts more than you thought it would when he agrees.

::

**i would give you the moon**

he's running late for your daughter's birth. it came unexpectedly, two months early, and he had gone down to the bodega to fetch you cream cheese. but the bodega was closed, and it was raining, so he said he'd walk until he got to the supermarket and then you went into labour, and then the traffic became horrendous because it was the holidays, and you didn't want a new years baby, and you didn't want your baby before he was here.

and you know you love him. you look at him from across every room and feel your heart rest - it doesn't sour or swoop or tinge with unrest, there's no discomfort in how you feel about him. there's no highs and no lows, no ups and downs. there's just a glance in the middle of a gala, a sly smile, and a released breathe you weren't even aware of holding. he calms your entire body down, causes love to burst at the seams, but its not a type of love that will break you. you don't wake up gasping in the middle of the night, unsure, confused, of where you are. a nightmare radiating through your whole body, the left side of the bed empty.

the first time you meet him he doesn't belong to you, and you hate anything that is serena's then. but he looks eerily familiar; in a buzzcut, in a mop of brown curls. he looks like the boy who sits next to you in advanced lit, who debated you on kafka and fitzgerald. later, there's a secret you learn that he never tells, he likes science fiction best of all. the trashy, terrible kind; a mirror to the stack of bad romance novels lined underneath the mattress of your bed.

you fall in love in secret, but everyone already knows.

there is an emptiness that runs through your body. like a river drained. starved for nutrients, a doctor tells you, starved for love, says a shrink. it all blends the same watercolour. that break you're expecting to be alone, curled up in your four poster bed fortress, but he dries the dishes you wash unexpectedly, says thank you when he leaves. he's in the same city you are, and it's too big to break if you run into him once, or twice, three times turning into four. he sits a pew away, back and to the left, and soon you're laughing in the same row; two seats apart, and there's a gap that's closing between the space you occupy and the acknowledgement of the hole rotting your heart clean.

he tells you he loves you for the first time when you already have one foot out the door.

the winter after henry is born he publishes another book. all fiction, he says. this time the characters don't explode off the page in real life counter parts and the manhattan he paints is unfamiliar to an untrained eye. serena is not jealous as she gushes, either too proud to say she knows or too proud of his work to recognise. but you see parts of yourself on every page, the secrets of your life stitched into the seams of his novel. he is sly with his details, giving only enough that it's like a secret whisper between the two of you. _do you remember,_ he's asking you. when you finish the book, you close it shut and shove it back in your book case. chuck curls his lips, swirls his scotch, but doesn't comment on the heavy weight hanging over your heads. you think he knows before you do. when humphrey asks what you thought, you tell him it was an improvement from the last and critique the technical areas with a heavy blush that spreads from your cheeks to your palms to your thigh. you ache, later, in bed at night with his invisible hands hovering over your skin.

there is a summer in rome you plan together, over espresso and the new yorker. he writes a list of place he wants to visit, you do the same. in bed, you swap ideas and spit-ball novel plots and share summaries from the books you're reading. he snores in his sleep, just lightly enough to irritate while remaining sweet. there's more than one thing about him that you loathe, but they don't matter anymore.

he tells you he's planning to propose to serena in a cinema, with his hand on your thigh. his thumb is pressing down, hard enough to leave a bruise, but chuck is away and chuck doesn't touch you anymore even though he tries. he tells you he loves her as audrey sits sadly in a scene. he's not asking for you to tell him don't do it, but he's asking for a protest. you press your lips together, bile rising in your throat and tell him to shut up. he touches your cunt through the fabric and you squeeze your eyes shut. you love him, and you love her, and this is wrong and maybe your penance is their happy marriage, and you know you love him most of all to keep doing this; over and over, no release for either of you. he stops and you stop, always right before. that way it doesn't cross a line.

the line is crossed on his wedding night. he pins you to the bed he shares with his new wife, and cums inside your cunt as you beg for more. you beg for him to leave her, your fingernails scratching his back. you will leave a mark so visible she'll know.

when they divorce three months later, she stops speaking to you. 

your daughter is named beatrice and she has his eyes, his hair and henry loves her. he says mommy, can i hold her. she's so small, so you say no. dan is less concerned. he leads him to the couch and teaches him how to support her head but she's so tiny, so small, so delicate, there's a rising panic in your throat that she will break and shatter all over the hardwood floors. henry is a beautiful boy but he is not careful with his hands or matters of the heart, an inheritance from his father.

these are the matters of the heart. he divorces serena and you stay with chuck and you fuck him in guest rooms and hotel parking lots. this is the life you choose to save face.


End file.
